Both Ways

Marcus Junior was born on the same day that Juno died.

Even though most of her face was covered by her ventilator, I still saw the sparkle in her dying eyes that day.

Months before that, before her condition worsened and machines had to do her breathing for her, she had just enough time to speak with her own voice, while she still could.

She had told me that it wasn't my fault.

That I had to live on with no regrets.

She promised to live long enough to see our son.

Somehow, no matter how she hurt, she held on until then.

I remembered my promise, and recited it to her with while looking into her fading eyes.

I promised to raise our son with her blessing and her love.

When her eyes shut for the last time, I cried louder than our newborn son did.

That day, a part of me went with her.

In the years after that, I tried to honor Juno's wishes, but no matter how I tried, I felt her absence every single day.

I had no time to really grieve.

I had to work.

I had no choice, especially after my work with Project Janus proved to be fruitful.

Marcus Jr. always had someone around to care for him even when I was at work, even if the government had selected them for their security clearance first and their babysitting skills second.

My superiors went out of their way to try to soothe me, to keep me calm, happy, but more importantly, on task and focused.

Project Janus would some day make history, they said.

It already had, technically, but there were simply too many unknowns to safely apply the technology beyond our laboratory environment, too many risks to national security let alone the safety of the world, and simply too many questions yet to be answered about consequences of its use.

It may come as a surprise, but my superiors did practice all due caution.

They aren't the bad guys in this story.

If anyone is the bad guy, it is Dr. Marcus Varro, Senior.

Me.

Every time I had time to come how and see my little boy, I knew, I just knew, that he knew someone was absent. Someone was missing.

There was love in that house and I made sure of that, but I had long anticipated, even dreaded, what his first words might be.

I was right.

"Mama."

I could see my own grief reflected within Junior's eyes, the same hazel hue as Juno's.

The critical period of Project Janus had passed.

When it did, I asked for a little more time off.

My request was granted.

I was also appointed an on-site grief counselors along with a psychiatric prescription.

That wasn't enough.

Nothing could possibly ever be enough.

Not without Juno.

I needed a hobby, my grief counselor said.

I agreed.

I needed a way to really come to terms with my loss.

I found it.

Day after day after that, every time I returned to work, I carefully and methodically called in each and every favor I had built up with my team.

With their help, and at great risk to us all, I started to bring my work home with me, piece by piece.

I knew I was under constant surveillance.

That's why I made friends with Major Diane Spengel, the security chief on site.

By the time I gained some sympathy from her, once we started talking on a first name basis, once we chatted and had coffee and talked on a first name basis, I took a risk and made it very clear to her that watching and listening to me grieve in an ugly way at home, in the one room in the house that Junior couldn't hear his papa cry, wasn't helping either of us.

There was irony to that.

I had to trust in Diane, and her mutual understanding she had being a parent herself, that she had granted me actual privacy in that one little room, enough privacy to let me come to terms with my loss at my own speed and in my own way.

And I did.

I came to terms with my loss by refusing to accept it.

Night after night, I fought that acceptance at the cost of sleep, and perhaps, sanity.

No amount of sleep medication could stop me.

The on-site medical team tested my blood to make sure I was taking it, and I did, but when it seemed to be clear that it wasn't working, they tapered my dose off.

Fortunately.

I needed to stay awake.

I needed to focus, especially as I approached the threshold of a new breakthrough.

I strived, for months, to miniaturize the Janus Device.

All I needed it to carry was one living passenger, one time.

Me.

In my mind, I code-named my hobby "Project Juno."

My counselor thought "Project Juno" was a scrapbook.

For the sake of plausibility, I actually did put together a scrapbook and showed it to my counselor.

I knew I only had one chance to make it work once I threw the switch.

There's no way I could hide the power requirements for the Juno Device, but if I did it right, I knew it wouldn't matter.

I knew that on-site security, friendship and favors or not, would kick down my door in less than a minute once they detected the power spike when the minuaturized device was activated.

I knew that all I would have to do was be one second faster than their response.

One point two, two, two into infinity seconds, to be exact.

If I could do that, I could make everything right again.

Just in case Diane decided to check in on me with a bit more scrutiny, I launched the one and only attempt at Project Juno on May 18.

The anniversary of the car crash.

Laboratory conditions were always stressful when the Janus device was turned on, but that one final time, I had seconds to get everything right as I heard shouting from outside my wall and pounding on the door.

I was only grateful that Junior was with his sitters that day.

I would see him again, I told myself.

I would see him and his mother, all over again.

I had seconds to spare between the start-up sequence and throwing the final switch before on-site security could cut the power, barge in and tackle me, wreck my equipment, or otherwise stop me.

I hesitated.

Maybe it was because I was now hearing the same people that had previously protected me, watched over the site, even played cards with me after hours, ramming down my door and throwing flashbangs.

Whatever the reason, in that moment of hesitation, I asked myself a theoretical question.

Was I truly sure that my previous self would effectively vanish during the one-for-one exchange of matter for energy?

I knew that the temporal trade would not be truly be atom for atom, molecule for molecule, mol for mol.

I had already done to obsessively reach and then maintainethe same bodyweight that I had when I had stepped on the scale on May 18, six years ago to the day.

Too much of me would have resulted in an intrusion of surplus energy into the universe that had previously been.

To sum it up for lay people, if I got my calculations wrong, there would be an explosion.

Just to leave room for error and with seconds left before Project Juno would all be in vain, I had already set the target date, time, and location for the reconstructed miniaturized device with just enough room for error to maximize chances that no one would be harmed, except myself, if anything was off on my calculations.

Quantum entanglement, I had found during my day job, was especially fickle.

I knew that the Ship of Theseus that was my body had already undergone the usual replacement of body cells, at varying rates, for all the long years I had lived as grieving widower, a single father, and as a theoretical physicist with Special Access Program clearance.

If I had correctly interpreted the data transmission findings from the Janus Device's first successful test runs, I would physically displace my previous self, six years ago, give or take some excess energy in the process.

Sending data back in the form of energy pulses for the Janus Device to collect and interpret was one thing.

I would be the first matter sent back the same way, even if I would be traveling the same path trailblazed by the device's own activation during that same experiment.

Was I about to create some sort of time paradox?

I decided it did not matter.

The device had already been proven to work.

If data pulses didn't yet destroy the universe as I had known it, what difference would sending back a grieving widower make?

My time for rumination was over.

I heard one more door get kicked down along with shouted final demands for me to drop to the floor and stop what I was doing amid a torrent of heavy stamping footfalls coming my way.

The final moment had come for Project Juno, now or never.

I threw the final switch on my little Juno Device.

The next thing I knew was a dazzling flash that didn't clear for almost a minute, and a literal pain in the rear from falling to the floor.

A different floor.

Did I make it? Was I back in my office at the Project Janus site?

As I lay there, getting my bearings and feeling feverish, I heard cheering outside and the pops of champagne corks.

My team, and all staff on site, were in a partying mood out there.

So was I, first time I was there, but now I was six years older, six years wiser, and coughing amid the smell of something burning in my office.

There had been a few molecules of extra energy unaccounted for after all.

Being just that far off on my calculations was enough to have scorched my office chair, desk, and a lot of the monitoring equipment around me.

Firefighters kicked down my door and carried me off, still dazed and perhaps a little delirious.

I think I remember that I kept asking them what time it was, what day it was, even while the other responders were still spraying down everything behind me with flame retardant foam.

It seemed that I no longer had to come up with an excuse to leave the party early, after all.

I looked years older than the last time I came in for a checkup a few days before, and maybe the staff doctor noticed.

Fortunately, apart from treating me for some smoke inhalation and superficial burns, all he did was prescribe me something to help me sleep.

It was the very same something that he had prescribed me years ago... or should I have considered it months from the new now?

It didn't matter.

My secret would die with me, I resolved, but first I had a long life to live.

With Juno.

With Junior.

"Oh my God," Juno said as I stumbled through the door, her bright amber eyes alight with life, but also with worry, "What happened to you?"

"Nothing to worry about," I told her, hurting my own singed face with the widest smile.

I could not blame her for her reaction because of what she saw of me at the door.

I was ragged, singed, reddened as if sunburnt, and admittedly a few years older.

But my relief, my gratitude, my joy pulled her in all the same, and she hugged me so hard that I sobbed in her open embrace.

She didn't go out that night to get ice cream at the site's commissary.

A party-drunk security guard didn't hit her car head on that night, didn't crush her ribcage and puncture her lungs, which never lead to a progressively worse prognosis of pulmonary failure and nerve damage that would have eventually paralyzed her.

I had the next few days off ,thanks to medical leave.

I only went out once during that time.

I got her that ice cream that she had waited so patiently for... along with a home pregnancy test.

I waited with escalating anxiety.

Did I regain my wife, but lose my son?

No.

The test banished my fears.

She was pregnant... and healthier by far than the first time around.

We embraced, and we kissed, and we cried happy tears together.

I returned to work, but now I had to do my best to keep a reasonable pace to match my ongoing progress from that point forward.

I knew the results of so many experiments before they happened the second time around.

Things were breezier and easier the second time around, both there and at home.

It helped to have a loving wife in good health and our son on the way.

Unfortunately, because I knew the Janus Device at least as well as I had known my own home-made Juno Device that I had left behind in the abandoned future, my own team started noticing my lack of sincere surprise regarding the outcome of further experiments and testing.

I overheard some of my team calling me "the wizard" behind my back, and not just because of the white hair that had started to sprout on my chin and along the sides of my head.

I clearly wasn't good at feigning ignorance.

"It's like he already came from the future," I overheard a few times.

I also had additional interviews with Diane.

It didn't help that I called her by her first name instead of Major Spengel.

I knew she suspected something, but she was a military officer, not a scientist or a theoretician, so all she did was put me under additional surveillance and recommend me to a counselor.

I had nothing to hide.

Not anymore.

The past future was far distant.

I was all smiles and contentment.

Months later, Juno gave birth to a healthy baby.

A girl.

Juno named her Carmen, without any input from me.

I had nothing to say.

I couldn't stop shaking.

I tried to express joy, I wanted to express joy, because I did feel joy... but I also felt a strange, implacable grief.

The simple act of going back in time had set ripples into motion the instant I arrived. People before my time called it the "Butterfly Effect," and I realized that Junior had become its first fatality.

The slightest nudge of causality, the slightest change of events, had caused a different sperm to fertilize my wife's waiting egg.

Millions of contenders could have been the one, and the dice had rolled again even though the last time I had made love to her was before the car accident... and before I had returned to prevent the car accident.

Consequently, I had what some psychiatrists call a "mixed episode."

I excused myself from Juno's room at the medical center and found a quiet place to come apart with grief, all over again.

Of course I had been happy that Juno was alive and well, and I was now the father of a baby girl.

But what happened to Junior?

Where was my son?

I already accepted that I had effectively obliterated my past self when I went back in time.

I had taken my previous self's place, molecule by molecule, atom by atom, energy for energy.

I once thought that the only calculable damage I could have possibly caused was the fire that broke out in my office.

Major Spengel and my own project supervisiors were breathing down my neck, but I ran additional tests under the best excuses I could, even as I tried to be the best father I could to little Carmen, and the best husband I could be for Juno.

Both of them could tell that something was wrong, but I must have looked too haunted to talk about it much.

They gave me distance, even my little girl that could have used a father.

Every day that I tried to find a trace of Junior out there, if there was such a place anymore, I became more of a stranger to them both.

The worst part was nothing was wrong, not by Juno nor Carmen's or anyone else's reckoning.

I realized that I was grieving for the loss of someone who, according to the known laws of the universe, never existed.

Just like before when I lost Juno, I refused to accept that.

Every work day, I found time to plan and prepare my own series of tests, pulses of energy, of data, of text transmissions.

They weren't for me, or for anyone else in the present as I knew it.

They were forwarded to the future that could have been... and as far as I knew, would never be. Yet I refused to fully believe that.

I forwarded personal information through the Janus Device to prove my identity, followed by proprietary technical knowledge, proof that the anomalies I were sending weren't just noise, not merely chaos, but a desperate cry for a response from a universe that I could only theoretically hope was still out there.

I couldn't help asking about Junior.

I sent out so many inquiries toward my team from my past that was now a lost future, all about my son.

I received no answer.

How could I?

I had years left to wait before I could know if I was calling to anything but the void.

But I sent more and more data all the same.

Anything, everything, that could improve the chances of an answer.

Unfortunately, as time went on waiting, as my gratitude for coming back to Juno became obsessive grief regarding the son I didn't just kill but seemingly erased from existence, I had become less subtle and more sloppy with my clandestine activity.

Major Spengel herself found out about the unauthorized uses of the Janus Device and ordered me detained and confined for questioning.

The questions stopped coming, and the visits were fewer and further between over time.

"Your family worries about you, you know," Major Spengel said as she stood at the door of my cell, flanked by Military Police escorts, "your real family. You should have resigned while you were ahead. Juno and Carmen need a father more than Uncle Sam needs some... mad scientist... trying to, what? Phone home to another universe?"

"What day is it?" I asked, tired, shaky, and heavily medicated.

"Oh no," Major Spengel said with a slow shake of her head, "not this again. Just let that go. You're in enough trouble already. It's a miracle you haven't yet been shipped out to..."

"Please, just one more time," I begged, with all the grief and pain in my eyes that I could sincerely present, "what day is it?"

"It's May 18," she said, "and that's why I'm here. I know this is a sensitive time for you. Ever since that fire in your office all those years back, you've been..."

"You're still with Project Janus," I began, preparing to ask for a favor that I was in no position to ask and she was in no position to grant, "could you ask my team if anything weird got picked up by the device?"

"Just let that go, Doctor Varro. For the last time..."

"Please?"

"No promises," Major Spengel sighed, "but I'll see what I can do. I'd rather see you back with your family than spending the rest of your life in a psych ward... or a federal prison."

I waited and waited.

I gave up hope.

I lost track of time.

I was too sad, too tired, to cry.

I didn't just lose a son.

My grief, maybe my delusional madness, had taken myself away from my Juno and Carmen.

I don't know how much time passed, hours or weeks maybe, before that door opened again with Major Spengel standing by it.

"Doctor," she said, with a tight-lipped stiff expression, but with what could only be regret in her dark eyes, "I... owe you an apology. Those calls you made..."

I kept quiet, curled up on the bed of my cell.

"Junior wants to talk to his daddy."

The next few hours were a blur of paperwork, exit interviews, paper signing, and oaths of secrecy, but it was all worth it and I would have done it until the end of time if I had to.

Under heavy guard and supervision, I began an unpredented and unplanned next step for Project Janus.

I returned Junior's call, this time with a temporal latency of seconds rather than years.

Whether there were infinite universes or just the two, with me being the effective father of one of them, it no longer mattered.

All that mattered was reading Junior's text, pulsed from the other side of the threshold, no longer in the past, but almost another present, a near-parallel present.

"Hi Daddy," Junior's message said. "The Major was nice and let me call you. Is Mommy there?"

"Could Mommy also talk to Junior?" I asked Major Spengel, the tears flowing again, but not of grief, "we already got permission from the other Major."

"Only if the other Major Spengel keeps an eye on him over there," she said, pinching her lips into a tight smile, only somewhat holding back her own tears.

Juno came to the facility for the first time that evening, granted temporary clearance for the sake of furthering the Project's explosive new ramifications for not just time travel but multiversal theory. She started getting to know her son from another lifetime... and our daughter gained a brother.

It was beyond even the Major's reach to allow Carmen to visit the site, but from that day forward, I started a new personal project with her, that I called Project Carmen.

Project Carmen was simple.

Carmen would write me notes, or more often than not tell me things to write down for her because she was shy about her handwriting, and I would take those to the lab to send to Junior on the other side, pending the Major's ongoing approval.

None of my work was secret anymore, in either universe, as far as I could tell.

In the meantime, my beloved Juno started taking me to couples' counseling.

There, she started to forgive my years of isolating obsession and madness, and I in turn resolved to finally know my daughter better before I missed any more milestones in her life.

Junior got his father back, in a way.

More than that, my son had gained a mother and a sister to pen pal with, thanks to the most expensive and dangerous mail carrier ever conceived by humanity.

All for the sake of ongoing scientific inquiry, of course.

I have more responsibilities than ever both as a father and a scientist, to two separate and distinct realities.

That is all fine by me.

I am now eternally grateful to have it both ways.